Enhancing social communication for children with HFA

Children with high-functioning autism (HFA) have the basic verbal ability for creating a story, but often lack the social understanding that is needed for such a task. Moreover, these children often prefer to play alone since they have difficulty in developing appropriate peer relationships and in interacting socially or emotionally with their peers. Based on Dr. Weiss' previous research, they hypothesize that running a game on a large "table-top" computer with a touch-screen interface (a computer with a display that is the size and orientation of a small table that allows both users to simultaneously interact with it by touch) that requires children to work together, will retain the advantages of working with a computer, yet facilitate an important dimension, namely communication and interaction with others. The main goal of the proposed study is to examine the effectiveness of a short-term intervention using an "enforced collaboration" paradigm to facilitate social-interactive skills among children with HFA compared to a group that has not received this intervention. The second goal is to examine whether children with HFA can apply their newly acquired ability to collaborate in other tasks. The third goal is to examine the effectiveness of the Story Table intervention on children's ability to narrate a story after treatment. Finally, if successful, Dr. Weiss' lab will look at ways to bring these activities to less expensive computing platforms.